Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

The Ontario Action Plan (OAP) identifies technology as an opportunity to constrain the growth in health care costs and eliminate barriers due to distance. Women's College Hospital (WCH) in Toronto offers breast reconstruction following mastectomy for breast cancer. Patients often travel significant distances to have this specialized surgery. At WCH, we use the QoC Health Inc mobile (smartphone) application to monitor breast reconstruction patients' home recovery. This technology eliminates one or more in-person clinic visits. This project speaks directly to the OAP by providing patients with timely contact (the right time) to their surgeon (the right care) from the comfort of their home (the right place). This technology has the potential to address wait times by freeing up specialty surgeon clinic time so that they may engage in new consultations and attend to patients in the emergency department. The first step to widespread implementation involves demonstrating cost-effectiveness. This study compares the costs of telemedicine follow-up care using the QoC Health Inc mobile application to conventional in-person follow-up care. We will consider all societal borne costs, and a narrower health system perspective that may be of key interest to health administrators and policy decision makers. Demonstrating cost-effectiveness will support local support from already engaged administration and broader interest will be gain through conferences and publication that appeal to health administrators and policy decision makers. This technology is generalizable to a wide variety of ambulatory surgeries, and therefore has the ability to impact a larger and growing population. We believe this work is in keeping with the Canadian Institute of Health Research's mandate to fund integrated solutions to support the continuum of personal and population-based care.